Mutah University

Effects of Internet Viral Marketing on

customers satisfaction. A study on fast food
firms effort on viral marketing

:by
Ala Momani , Alaa Alqadi and Saif Addeen
Obeidat

Faculty of Business Administration

January 2015
Ala.Momani@gmail.com +962777070212
Supervisor:

Dr. Malek Al-Majali

Index
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Subject
Chapter 1
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Study statement
1.3 Study questions
1.4 Objectives.
Chapter 2
Literature study 2.1
2.2 Previous studies
2.2.1 Measure of viral marketing impact on
purchasing decision.
2.2.2 Determinants of Customer Satisfaction in Fast
Food Industry.
2.2.3 The Viral makes you aware -How is brand
association affected by viral marketing through
individual networks?
2.3 Fast food restaurants firms effort in social media
2.4 Dimensions of viral marketing affecting customers
satisfaction.
2.4.1 Promotion
2.4.2 Brand Awareness
2.4.3 The Brand Trust
2.4.4 Brand Association
Chapter 3
3.1 Conceptual Model and Hypotheses
References

Chapter 1

1.1

Introduction

Viral marketing is becoming a key instrument in marketing

strategies now days, used by a lot of firms to achieve there goals.
viral marketing uses the instincts of humans to communicate share
knowledge and socialize with each other , due to the wide spread of
the internet among all people now days, and the tendency of people
from different ages to spend more time on the internet to use the
social media, some times more than the time spent on watching TV ;
viral marketing is getting this advantage as it can penetrate the social
networks of any person as easy as a click of a mouse from one friend
to defuse among all friends in the same social network, and if this ad
is attractive enough, well designed and noticeable, friends will
distribute it in other social networks making a splash or a Buzz in the
internet spreading like a contagious virus converting the word of a
mouth to the word of a mouse.
Fast food restaurants Firms know that the world is changing in
their favor as the modern family concepts tend to depend on home
cocked food less and the need for fast food is increasing. Those
firms need to drive customers to their restaurants threw building the
awareness trust loyalty and satisfaction toward their fast food brand.
In this proposal we will study the effects of viral marketing
conducted threw internet on fast food restaurants customers
satisfaction, Threw the dimension of Promotion, awareness, Trust
and association. A literature study of some researches related to viral
marketing and fast food customers satisfaction, in addition to viral
marketing related subjects from some well known fast food brands
websites to get the effects that may impact customer satisfaction.

1.2

Study statement

Fast food companies are considering viral marketing in their

marketing mix more widely threw well deliberated employment of
current social networks in the internet to increase their direct and
indirect effects over customers. In this proposal we are going to
study the effects of viral marketing dimensions of promotion,
awareness, trust and association over fast food restaurants
customers satisfaction.
1.3 Study questions
What are the effects of viral marketing on fast food restaurant
customers satisfaction?
1. What is the effect of Promotion on fast food customers
satisfaction?
2. What is the effect of Brand awareness on fast food customers
satisfaction?
3. What is the effect of trust on fast food customers satisfaction?
4. What is the effect of Brand association on fast food customers
satisfaction?

1.4 Objectives.
To study the impact of Viral Marketing dimensions of
Promotion, Brand Awareness, Trust and Association on fast food
customers satisfaction.

Chapter 2
Literature study 2.1
Viral marketing is a marketing technique that stimulate people
to pass on a product or a Brand name advertisement that has a
marketing message to others in their social network creating an
exponential growth of the advertisement visibility the marketed
message " threw targeted people or potential customers . Marketers
can use many kinds of communication media to start seeding their
initial message like TV, magazines, newspaper, and sometimes the
post mail, but as the internet now days is penetrating among all
people individually throw their personal computers laptops tablets
and even mobile phones accessible any where any time; the internet
became the most favorable media to deliver viral marketing
messages easily with less cost than the TV and other media .
The internet provide a lot of options to start seeding the viral
marketing message like e mails , blogs , online forums , you tube ,
flicker and social media networks known as web2 like face book ,
twitter and google+ , marketers recently concentrate their effort on
social media networks because of their resilience and dynamic ways
of holding all kinds of media from videos to music and sound
messages and text messaging as well, and the ability of these
networks to reach customers directly . these networks have a unique
feature that provide a direct statistical measure of how many times a
certain message has been viewed giving the marketers an option to
monitor their effort and give us a key instrument to study the viral
marketing effects on customers . This may justify why we chose the
viral marketing conducted threw social media networks for our
study.
As illustrated in the previous paragraph we are going to
examine the viral marketing activities of some well known fast food
restaurants brands like McDonalds and Burger king threw the most
used internet social media websites and the websites of the
mentioned brands as well, to determine the effects of such marketing
technique viral marketing in the fast food customers satisfaction.
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2.2

Previous studies
2.2.1 Measure of viral marketing impact on purchasing
decision. By Dr Rudaina Othman Yusef 2009

This study was conducted on a sample of internet users from

students of marketing at Zarqa private university and Zaytuna
University in Jordan. The objectives of this study were:
a) To find the extent of perception of the sample to viral
marketing concept.
b) The impact of contents of what the firms deliver threw internet
by using viral marketing concept.
c) To find the accuracy of the content from the customers
perspective that led customers to relay on and purchase.
d) The impact of viral marketing on purchasing decision of
customers.
The most important findings for this study are:
a) There is impact and relationship of viral marketing on the
customer decision to by.
b) The information sent threw the website relevant and credible
and reliable, thereby forming a positive image of the
organization sent.
c) There is a relationship between the concept of viral marketing
and proliferation of advertising messages via website.
2.2.2 DETERMINANTS OF CUSTOMESATISFACTION
IN FAST FOOD INDUSTRY. By Shahzad Khan 2012
A research to find what is the key success factors for fast food
industry in region of Peshawar Pakistan. His sample was collected
from restaurants like KFC and Pizza hut .the study finds that there is
a significant positive relationship between the Promotion, Service
quality, Customer expectations, Brand, Physical Environment, Price,
and Taste of the product to customer satisfaction.
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2.2.3 The Viral makes you aware -How is brand association

affected by viral marketing through individual networks?
By Ida nelson and Magnus Svensson 2009
The purpose with this paper is to research the effect a network
conducted viral marketing, has on consumers brand association.
The study used a viral marketing commercial of not well known skin
care brand (Apoliva), the sample was of people within the Face book
network who are living in Sweden and speaking Swedish (because it
was a Swedish commercial). The findings show that consumers tend
to buy a brand although they do not like the commercial related to
the brand, since the commercial itself is not of importance and in
most cases the consumers do not relate the commercial with the
brand. In other words viral marketing is able to impact the awareness
of brand even though the customers dont like the commercial itself.
2.3 Fast food restaurants firms effort in social media
Fast food restaurant firms are engaging heavily in social media
networks where table 1 shows a recent statistics of how many fans
four of well known fast food brands have in their main pages or
channels . We chose for this study the fore famous social networks
as follows:
a. Facebook : Facebook is a will known free social
networking website that allows registered users to create
profiles, upload photos and videos, send messages and keep
in touch with friends, family and colleagues. It is available
in many different languages, each profile contains a wall
which is a virtual bulletin board that holds videos photos
and text messages, face book has about 1350 million users
worldwide table 1 shows the number of fans that hit alike
for the fast food brand advertisement .

b. Twitter : Twitter is a free social networking micro blogging

service that allows registered members to broadcast short
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posts. And share short videos and photos but its mainly for
short blogging tweets where registered members can
follow freely the tweets of anybody they like and even all
the conversations related to tweets, twitter has about 284
million users worldwide table 1 shows the number of
followers for each brand.
c. Google+ :
Google+ (or Google Plus) is a social
networking and identity service that is owned and operated
by Google Inc. Google has described Google+ as a "social
layer" that enhances many of its online properties, google+
gives users the ability to form social circles that can he
interact with each circle individually giving it a power
advantage over face book ,it has now about 540 million
active users , table 1 shows the number of followers for our
fast food brands sample.
d. YouTube : YouTube allows people to discover, watch and
share videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to
connect, inform, and acts as a distribution platform for
videos . individuals and firms are allowed to create their
own channels in YouTube to set their vides , anybody
wither he is subscribed to the service or not can see and
download videos , table 1 shows the number of uploaded
videos views for each fast food brand.
The good thing about the social internet networks that they are
available to anybody with internet access, and they provide a free
statistical measure of the activity on each page wall or channel,
which give the marketers and researchers the ability to see the
popularity of certain Ads or videos among internet users.

Table 1 updated 2/12/2014

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ran
k

Brand

# of Twitter
followers

McDonalds

# of
FaceBook
fans
54,801,660

2.65 M

# of
Google+
views
2,839,359

# of
YouTube
views
20,178,606

KFC

36,160,982

710 K

105,739

5,996,033

Burger
King

7,503,751

982 K

6,277,539

13,452,048

Popeyes
Chicken

496,310

37,199 K

13,125

72,101

Table 1 illustrates some of the viral marketing effort by the fast

food brands, the numbers are from their pages on the social media
targeting USA English speaking customers, a lot of other pages from
the same Brand name targeting deferent regions and languages of the
world, McDonalds as an example has more than 30 million video
viewers in their Canadian YouTube channel alone. But we are using
one region for our study because we noticed that marketers are using
the same viral ideas with deferent themes for deferent regions and
languages. We noticed that the Arabic language is not will
represented in fast food brands effort toward viral marketing except
for promotional advertisements, no videos nor direct communication
targeting Arabic speaking customers to build trust in brand and
quality of materials used in their products, this may will be a concern
soon for fast food brands as Arabic content on internet is growing
and Arab people will soon begin to concern about their kind and
quality of food offered by fast food restaurants .

2.4 Dimensions of viral marketing affecting customers

satisfaction.

2.4.1 Promotion
Promotion is communicating information between seller and
potential buyer or others in the channel to influence attitudes and
behavior. The marketing managers main promotion job is to tell
target customers that the right Product is available at the right Place
at the right Price.(McCarthy and Pereault, 2002)
At a quick glance of what kind of viral materials do fast food
brands have in their social networks; one will find the new
promotions as the first to come, a lot of nice pictures and short
videos of what it seem a delicious meal with happy faces around it
with a good price tag appearing to show how affordable those meals
are, some of the promotions ad a value to the customers by offering
extra free sandwich with each meal ordered or bigger French fries at
the same price of a small one. Another kind of promotion we noticed
most of fast food restaurants do to a achieve customer satisfaction is
the happy meal designed for the kids, because marketers know that
customers will be satisfied if their kids are happy and satisfied. So
some viral marketing messages show happy kids with a meal in a
restaurant and happy with a toy home too.
From our perspective as illustrated from the paragraph above,
promotion is an important dimension of viral marketing and
promotion can have a positive impact on fast food customer
satisfaction. Hence promotion is our first independent variable as a
dimension for Viral marketing effect on fast food customers
satisfaction.

2.4.2 Brand Awareness

According to (Keller,1993) Brand awareness is the
combination of brand recognition and brand recalling. Brand
recognition means if a customer can have heard or seen a brand
and then see or hear it again, the customer will remember the
brand and distinct it from competing Brands
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One of the best examples of viral marketing campaigns for fast

food restaurants that we found in our review, is the Burger king viral
marketing campaign which was conducted on April 2004 the
campaign was known as the subservient chicken if you go to
YouTube and perform a search for the original videos for the
subservient chicken you will find that it was a simple idea but
creative one, it represent a man wearing a chicken suit in a living
room and he is ready to do what he told to do from the users by
entering a command threw an interactive website specially created
for this campaign , the website will ask you to tell a friend by
sending the link in an easy way by email which led in turn to
propagate virally between people. A hidden message in the campaign
telling that people cant say no to chicken dont say no and that
chicken wants you to remember our restaurants when you think
about food.
Burger king was facing trouble competing with other tough
brands like McDonalds and KFC and need to improve the awareness
of its brand and products, its already lagging McDonalds and KFC
in chicken sandwiches and want to build awareness about its new
product the Tender crisp sandwich, the campaign was specially
designed for this product as a part of bigger marketing campaign mix
, the result was a success to the campaign designer and Burger king .
According to (Andrew Schneller and John Marshall,2007) in their
case Social Media and the Burger King Brand Sales of Tender
Crisp Chicken Sandwiches increased by an average of 9% per week
after the campaign. This represents the success of the campaign.
According to ( Kotler, et al, 2012) they define the Brand
Awareness as Consumers ability to identify the brand under
different conditions, as reflected by their brand recognition or recall
performance and we think that the subservient chicken campaign
was able to rebuild and improve the awareness of the Burger King
brand at all .this awareness will drive the customers to Burger Kings
restaurants and if they find what they expect from previously
positioned recognition of Brand in their minds; they will be satisfied
and so The Brand Awareness is the second dimension of viral
marketing effect on fast food customers satisfaction.
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2.4.3 The Brand Trust

Trust for the fast food brands is a big issue; they are already
criticized by the media for targeting children and customers with
unhealthy food served by their restaurants. Food they serve is full
with extra calories, according to (Jennifer L. Harris and others,2010)
in their research Evaluating Fast Food Nutrition and Marketing to
youth people in the united states are shifting toward consuming
more food outside their homes and most of that consumption is for
fast food restaurants due to heavy advertisement from fast food
firms, The internet is full of information about obesity and fast food
brands relation, but this is not the full story, a new kind of small
videos and pictures are shared widely in the internet social networks
with big number of viewers worldwide spreading virally like a virus.
These videos and pictures concentrate on the material used in fast
food meals, some of these videos have millions of views, in a little
search in the internet we find one of these videos attacking
McDonalds nuggets meal one of McDonalds famous chicken
products. The video illustrates the process of producing the nuggets
and known as the Red Slime myth the process begins from hole
live chickens and hens being blinded in some machine that will turn
them into red slime of chicken meat and blood. This red slime looks
at the first glance like a gigantic pink ice-cream; shortly the observer
will discover the disgusting fact of the mix, after that a chemical
substance which the video calls as ammonium hydroxide is added
to the mix to kill bacteria, the hole mixture interred another machine
which gives the final shape and dressing for the nuggets exactly as
they appear in McDonalds restaurants.
American people used to call fast food products as junk food
but videos as illustrated in the previous paragraph ads the terms
disgusting and unhealthy, imagine what these unknown origin videos
and pictures spreading in social networks could do to customer trust
of fast food restaurant Brands!
rank

Question

Duration and
Upload date

Number of
YouTube viewers

Is pink slime in a chicken

McNugget ?

6.54 minute video

Dec 8 2014

5,108,864

12

What are NcRip patties

made of ?

5.28 minute video

Nov 3 2014

2,424,972

Is McDonalds Beef real?

4.30 minute video

Oct 13 2014

2,100,405

What kind of potato do

you use and are they
processed then formed?

5.13 minute video

Oct 16 2012

2,982,872

McDonalds as well as other fast food brands have to defend

back against negative viral marketing information, and good
marketers need to find a way to turn negative viral marketing into
positive, McDonalds was the first to act by launching a huge viral
marketing campaign called our food your question maybe because
MacDonald is the largest fast food firm spending on advertisement
and they find one of their products is directly mentioned in the red
slime videos, McDonalds new campaign is based on viral marketing
techniques, its designed to answer the direct questions from
customers about the ingredients of the meals specially beef and
chicken, the campaign uses twitter and face book meanly to capture
the question, and they use well designed videos to answer, letting the
video to be shared by customers themselves in their own social
media. According to (MacCarthy&Perrealt,2002) customers can
trust information that is the same information used by someone
inside the company. Table 2 shows some of these questions and the
number of YouTube views for the answer.
Table 2

Table 2 shows that McDonalds marketing communicating channels

throw social media are reaching a lot of customers, which reflects
the efficiency of social media to hold viral marketing messages, and
maybe the curiosity of people toward what they eat, MacDonald is
trying to say that bad ingredients may be used in fast food
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restaurants but not by McDonalds. We think that threw the our food
your question campaign McDonalds is able to build trust of its
brand over its customers, and this trust will led to customers
satisfaction, from our perspective trust is one dimension of viral
marketing impact on fast food customer satisfaction .
2.4.4 Brand Association
Brand associations are the informational nodes linked to the
brand node in memory and contain the meaning of the brand for
consumers. In other word, brand association is what the consumer
likes about the brand; what about the brand that bring meaning to the
consumer.
According to Keller, (1993), when building brand equity, it is very
important that the consumers have good, strong and special
associations to the brand.
Keller (1993, 1998) classifies brand associations into three major
categories: attributes, benefits and attitudes. Attributes are those
descriptive features that characterize a brand, such as what a
consumer thinks the brand is or has and what is involved with its
purchase or consumption. Benefits are the personal value consumers
attach to the brand attributes, that is, what consumers think the brand
can do for them. Brand attitudes are consumers' overall evaluations
of a brand.
Viral marketing is able to influence the feeling of customers toward
the value and personality of the brand as well as descriptive features
and characteristics of the products related to the Brand, which
consist the Brand association concept. In this study we are
considering Brand association as a dimension of Viral marketing
effects on fast food restaurants customers satisfaction.

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Chapter 3
3.1 Conceptual Model and Hypotheses

To study the impact of viral marketing on fast food customers

satisfaction, hypotheses were presented by the following model. This
model has been inferred by previous studies, and since this study is
narrow, The following abbreviated form was prepared:

Through literature reviews, it was noted that the viral marketing

greatly affects fast food customers satisfaction.
This study examines the impact of the viral marketing on fast food
customers satisfaction; five hypotheses have been derived from the
previous model:
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1) H1: There is a positive effect for the viral marketing on

fast food customers satisfaction.
2) H2: There is a positive effect for the promotion on fast
food customers satisfaction.
3) H3: There is a positive effect for the awareness on fast
food customers satisfaction.
4) H4: There is a positive effect for the trust on fast food
customers satisfaction.
5) H5: There is a positive effect for the Brand association on
fast food customers satisfaction.

References

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